Fleas are wingless, brown, bloodsucking insects that may infest dogs and cats, and other warmblooded animals. Fleas transmit several diseases (for example, plague) and parasites such as tapeworms. Young animals heavily infested with fleas may die from severe blood loss. Fleas prefer certain species of animals but will attack any source of blood if the preferred animal is not available. The cat ...

Bartonella henselae (Rhizobiales: Bartonellaceae) is a Gram-negative fastidious bacterium of veterinary and zoonotic importance. The cat flea Ctenocephalides felis (Siphonaptera: Pulicidae) is the main recognized vector of B. henselae, and transmission among cats and humans occurs mainly through infected flea feces. The present study documents the use of a quantitative molecular approach to fol...

Crucifer-feeding flea beetles, Phyllotreta spp., are chronic insect pests in Canadian prairie canola production. Multiple laboratory and field feeding bioassays were conducted to determine the susceptibility of a wide range of crucifer species, cultivars, and accessions to feeding by flea beetles with the goal of discovering sources of resistant germplasm. In 62 bioassays of 218 entries, no con...

Yersinia pestis, the bacterial agent of plague, forms a biofilm in the foregut of its flea vector to produce a transmissible infection. The closely related Yersinia pseudotuberculosis, from which Y. pestis recently evolved, can colonize the flea midgut but does not form a biofilm in the foregut. Y. pestis biofilm in the flea and in vitro is dependent on an extracellular matrix synthesized by pr...

Understanding non-random patterns in the taxonomic composition of communities occurring in insular or fragmented habitats remains a major goal of ecology. Nested subset patterns are one possible departure from random community assembly that has been reported for communities of both free-living and parasitic animals. Here, we investigate the effects of extrinsic factors on the occurrence of nest...

This study was conducted to assess the prevention of egg laying and the inhibition of the emergence of the cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis) resulting from the application of a combination of fipronil and permethrin (Frontline Tri-Act®/Frontect®, Merial) on dogs. Sixteen healthy dogs were included after pre-treatment live flea counts and randomly allocated to two groups. Eight dogs served as unt...

Flea-borne pathogens were screened from 100 individual cat fleas using a PCR approach, of which 38 % infected with at least one bacterium. Overall, 28 the flea samples positive for Bartonella as inferred ITS DNA region. Of these, 25 (7/28) identified clarridgeiae, 42.9 (12/28) henselae consisted two different strains, and 32.1 (9/28) koehlerae, was detected first time in Malaysia. Sequencing gl...

We report the first record of ectoparasites from Nelson's woodrat, Neotoma nelsoni, a rare, endemic mammal of east-central Mexico. We also describe a new flea species of Anomiopsyllus (A. perontesis n. sp.), which presents a complete row of bristles on sternum IX and 3 blunt spines on movable process; provide a new country record for the flea Stenistomera alpina (Baker, 1985); and report a new ...

A survey of fleas on mice during the mouse population explosion that occurred in eight communities in the western side of leeward Oahu was carried out in the summer of 2006. A total of 1440 mice were obtained. 305 oriental rat fleas, Xenopsylla cheopis (Rothschild) were recovered from these mice. No significant difference existed for the flea infestation rates, the average number of fleas per m...

Howardula dominicki n. sp. is described from specimens collected from the tobacco flea beetle, Epitrix hirtipennis (Melsheimer), at Oxford, North Carolina , and is distinguished from other members of the genus . Parasitism by H. dominicki sterilized female flea beetles and often led to the death of larvae.